


He Who Guides

by bwyn



Series: Afterlife [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Afterlife, Alternate Universe - Afterlife, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-11-10 02:48:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11118303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bwyn/pseuds/bwyn
Summary: Lance wakes up to darkness. It envelops him in a soft, velvety cloak—and he wonders, how? There's nothing for him to touch, yet when he spreads phantom fingers, there's sensation there, as if the void is heavy. He's certain of his body—or maybe not?—and decides to chance a blink.Nothing. He blinks again. And again. Nothing—wait.





	He Who Guides

**Author's Note:**

> _(:3」∠)_
> 
> this just in i have no control also idk what's going on w that formatting but an attempt was made

Lance wakes up to darkness. It envelops him in a soft, velvety cloak—and he wonders, _ how?  _ There's nothing for him to touch, yet when he spreads phantom fingers, there's sensation there, as if the void is heavy. He's certain of his body—or maybe not?—and decides to chance a blink.

 

Nothing. He blinks again. And again. Nothing— _ wait _ . 

 

There. 

 

A speck. A sparkling speck. 

 

Lance narrows his eyes and the spot of light becomes two. He blinks in surprise and there's four. Then eight. Suddenly the void is full to the brim with stars, bright and dim, flickering weakly and glowing strong. Lance gapes at the influx of constellations unfamiliar to him. He looks down and his belly lurches with vertigo—the starscape is reflected in water still as glass. Like the sky, it comes into focus swiftly, lighting up the simple fabric of his loose clothes. The more he focuses, Lance begins to notice the shift of stars, churning like phytoplankton in the bottomless depths.    
  
"Holy shit," he murmurs. The deep space surrounding him seems to absorb the sound.    
  
He turns slowly on the spot, gaze lifting to the sky. A stretch of dense stars, clustered like a path, blurrily halves the sky. There’s something vaguely familiar about it. For some reason, his heart aches.   
  
"There you are!"    
  
Lance yelps, springing away from the sudden presence at his shoulder. He spins to see—a face? A pair of glowing blue eyes, lacking in iris and pupil, with a wide Cheshire smile just as bright.   
  
"What the hell?"    
  
The smile widens in a laugh and the eyes crinkle. The rest of a child's body comes into perspective, too dark in contrast to the glow pulsing faintly just beneath their skin.   
  
"Made ya flinch," teases the spirit...thing.    
  
Lance sputters indignantly. "No shit! You can't just come up behind someone in the middle of the night and—and—!"   
  
"Oh, is this night?" muses the spirit, tilting cerulean sclera to the glimmering ocean.   
  
"Uh—up-—up there," corrects Lance, cautiously pointing at the sky.   
  
"Oh, hello night!" they chirp.   
  
"Hi," says Lance automatically, and at once feels stupid. "Um, where am I and who are you?"   
  
"Your afterlife, and I'm your guide!"   
  
"Ah, right." He's dead? He's dead. He's… dead. "Oh."   
  
"I just have to show you your door, apparently," says his apparent guide, breezy and careless.   
  
"Apparently?" Lance figures if he had a living body, he would feel lightheaded by now. As it stands, he simply feels… light. Slowly but surely, the realization that he is, in fact,  _ super dead _ becomes obvious—because  _ of course he’s dead. _

 

If he recalls correctly, it happened when he—or wait, no, it happened because of—

 

Lance can’t remember how he died. 

 

Somehow, that doesn’t bother him nearly as much as it should. He looks up to the sky, his guide chattering about something or other, their glow bobbing in his periphery. The longer he gazes upon the stars, the more he thinks that there is something incredibly important he is forgetting. It aches like the swathe of stars he can’t name. 

 

Meanwhile, his guide is doing their very best to regain his attention. “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!”   
  
“What?” sighs Lance.

 

“I spy with my little eye...” smiles the child.

 

There’s really innumerous things that Lance would rather do than play I Spy with—actually no, he would rather ignore the hollow feeling in his chest, if there is nothing he can recall to fill it.

 

“Stars?” he guesses.

 

They giggle. “No!”

 

“Water?”

 

“Nuh uh! What’s water?”

 

“...Plankton?”

 

“No, silly!” pouts his guide, cheeks ballooning out childishly. “Your doors!”

 

Lance frowns as he looks down at the child. “My doors—? Oh. Right, my doors.”

 

They beam at him. “Your doors,” they repeat in a stage-whisper, and then dance backwards, the mirror surface of the water rippling beneath their feet. 

 

The movement draws Lance’s gaze, and he sees them—three discrepancies in the churning starlit water. They’re all difficult to see, cast in shadow several inches down and submitting to the whim of the rippling surface. Lance kneels to get a better look, the furrow in his brow deepening. Whatever he was hoping for—a distraction, a clue—by playing along with the guide is utterly dashed the moment his eyes make sense of what they’re seeing.

 

They’re all familiar in a way that the stars are not. It’s not just something he’s  _ certain _ he’s seen before—no, this is more than that, it’s nostalgic. A time and place long gone, the memory of them leaving the barest imprint upon him as the tail end of a breeze.

 

The first is a sliding metal doorway, gleaming fiercely under the uneven light, shot through with blazing cracks like lightning bolts. The second is a nondescript white, with a polished golden doorknob and a curl of morning glories growing steadily from the keyhole. But the third—oh the third burns something in Lance that he can’t describe. It’s old wood, the green paint peeling away roughly, framing a screen with rips and pockmarks—and he  _ yearns _ for it.

 

His hand is already stretching out towards it, dipping into the glimmering water, his nose mere inches from the surface. He freezes there. Past the screen, he thinks he sees rough wooden floorboards lit by the dawn sun. 

 

_ This door _ , he thinks,  _ will take me home. _

 

Lance doesn’t remember home. He doesn’t know what home was—what it looked like, how it smelled—or who is there, waiting for him,  _ missing him _ . He had a family, and friends. Would he see them beyond that door?

 

“There are no people waiting for you through there.”

 

Lance jerks away from the door. He completely forgot the guide was still there. They’re sitting cross legged now, chin propped on a hand with nails in a glowing gradient from blue to green. One barely discernable eyebrow arches.

 

With a quick clearing of his throat, Lance tries to mask his desire, but it’s obvious the guide is having none of it. Their smile curves into a lopsided smirk. Lance sits back on his heels and turns to look away with a haughty, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

 

“That so?” sniffs the guide.

 

“But,” says Lance, “say I did. How… would  _ you _ know?”

 

“I’m a  _ guide _ ,” they say. “It’s my job to know.”

 

“Everything?”

 

“Many things.”

 

“Like where this door will take me?”

 

The guide’s smirk stretches wickedly. “Bingo!”

 

Lance’s heart leaps in his chest, and just as quickly frosts over with disappointment. Then it’s true, no one is waiting for him beyond that rustic screen door. He looks down at it, then away before his yearning can overcome his logic. There’s nothing for him there. Not through that mockery of unknown memories. 

 

“Where will they take me?” asks Lance, trying to find solace in the curiosities of the morning glories and the steel door’s glow.

 

“Oh, I am  _ so _ glad you asked.” The guide shifts slightly closer to him, pointing with enthusiasm at the lightning door. “To work.” The morning glories. “Rebirth.” The screen door, so tempting, so warm and welcoming—”The afterlife.”

 

_ Afterlife _ . The gears turn in Lance’s head. Then he blinks, tears his gaze away from the excited trembling of the guide’s pointing finger. “Rebirth, got it. Afterlife? Sure—but  _ work? _ ”

 

“Guiding people,” they explain, adding with a flourish, “Like what I’m doing right now.”

 

“This—” Lance points between the two of them, “—is considered work?”

 

“Yep!”

 

“Why the hell would I do that?” sighs Lance.  _ Afterlife _ is staring at him, an old door shredded by sand and wind—but  _ rebirth _ is starting to sound tempting as well. A second chance. Or maybe a third, or fourth—who is he to say he hasn’t chosen that exact door before?

 

“You get to meet cool people, see their afterlives—and I mean like, there’s the  _ afterlife _ afterlife, and then there’s this in-between world that’s your own. Y’feel? Not gonna lie, your’s is pretty neat.”

 

“I don’t understand,” begins Lance, and he’s interrupted by another luminescent gesture.

 

“You know, bring people to their doors, explain what has to be done.” They jut their chin onto their fist. “Sometimes they argue, and cry, or wander around confused  _ forever _ , but eventually they choose a door. I’m really just supposed to say what each door  _ means _ . Like, reborn into a new body with no memories. Chilling in the  _ afterlife _ afterlife. With no memories. Or wandering around as a guide.”

 

“With no memories?”

 

“Nah, it’s more like—”

 

The guide shuts up immediately, lips sucking into their mouth. They look incredibly uncomfortable, even going so far as to lift a hand to rub at their mouth. Lance simply stares until the guide is able to speak again, gasping on air they could have easily breathed in through their nose. 

 

Once they’re in the clear, Lance leans forward, nearly losing his balance. “So if I choose to work, I’ll get my memories back?”

 

The guide scowls at him and gestures at their mouth. “Obviously I can’t tell you!”

 

“You nearly did,” he points out.

 

“And I nearly lost my tongue for it,” sniffs the guide. “No, you can figure that out on your own. Let’s just say, it isn’t… what you hope for.”

 

Lance sits back again, wrinkling his nose at his guide’s sudden desire to play by the rules. “Fine.”

 

And—being Lance—he plunges his hand into the water until his palm collides with smoldering cracks.

 

“You didn’t even wait f—” the guide is squawking, but the door shatters inwards and the entire world turns on its axis, effectively cutting off whatever else they were going to say. 

 

Water becomes sky, the sky becomes water, the Milky Way—was that it all along?—spiralling into a singular point of light beyond Lance’s outstretched fingers. The other doors are gone in a whirlwind, and Lance is only allowed the briefest of moments to regret not sliding his fingers over that old green frame, before he’s being whisked away.

 

When he next has the chance to think, it’s of long beaches, blue oceans, coral the colour of the sunset, an impossibly vast sky, unfamiliar constellations—and warm hands, violet eyes, the embrace of a mother and the laugh of a lover.


End file.
